Intel is set to release its next generation of desktop chips before the end of the month, but a German retailer has jumped the gun and already sold through its stock of 120 Rocket Lake Core i7-11700K processors.
As Tom’s Hardware reports, the retailer in question is Mindfactory and apparently the company’s managers gave the greenlight to sell the chips days, if not weeks before Intel intended to officially launch them. The inevitable has therefore happened, and benchmarks are starting to appear for these processors.
The benchmarks so far use the Cinebench R20 testing suite and it’s not fantastic news for Intel. We do need to caveat here that these early benchmarks are from unknown system specs, so take them with a grain of salt.
Andreas Schilling from Hardware Luxx tweeted out single-threaded and multi-threaded performance charts (see above). For single-threaded performance, the Core i7-11700K was behind both the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X and the Ryzen 9 5950X. Compared to the 5950X this new Core i7 is 8% slower for single-threaded operations. For multi-threaded operations, the Core i7 is behind the Core i9-10900K, the Ryzen 7 5800X, and the Ryzen 5950X, which is in a league of its own.
It’s also important to compare the 11700K to the previous generation Intel chips. In single-threaded operations it’s 15% faster than the 10700K, while in multi-threaded operations it’s also 15% faster than the 10700K and 4% slower than the Core i9-10900K. Keep in mind, however, that the 10900K has 10 cores compared to the 11700K’s eight cores.
We won’t know the true performance of this new Rocket Lake processor until the official benchmarks appear along with the full spec of the system they were run on. However, as these are production chips being tested, the Cinebench R20 results must be close to the performance we should expect.
